Archive for category French 20th century history

More than a Name on a List: Hélène Berr

Posted by cathannabel in French 20th century history, Genocide, Second World War on January 26, 2013

 

It’s Holocaust Memorial Day.   I’m thinking about how we can build bridges between past and present, by telling individual stories, by giving back to the people who were swallowed up in that terror their names, their faces, their uniqueness.

 

 

Frieda Linder-Kornweitz, from Vienna, died aged 31 with her daughter Karin (aged 7) at Auschwitz, December 1943 (http://jewishtraces.org/plus-quun-nom-dans-une-liste-frieda-linder-kornweitz/)

 

 

Sulamite-Solange Ast, age 18, died with her younger brother Marc and their mother, at Auschwitz in 1943.  Their father survived.

 

(http://www.holocaust-history.org/klarsfeld/French%20Children/html&graphics/T0453.shtml)

 

http://www.stolpersteine.com/

 

Sometimes we just have a name, sometimes a photograph and fragments of a life. And sometimes from the darkness a voice emerges that is so vivid that as you read you hear it, you hear the urgency, the passion, the despair and you want to reach out.  Helene Berr’s is such a voice.

 

 

Her diary describes her life in Paris between 1942 and 1944.  It  wasn’t published till 2008, but since then it has become an essential document of the Holocaust and specifically of the Occupation of France. After the Liberation, her fiance and surviving family members circulated the manuscript amongst themselves, but eventually it was offered to the Shoah Memorial, published to great acclaim, and since then has been translated into 26 languages.  It’s inspired an exhibition at the Shoah Memorial , which uses Helene’s story and her words to illuminate some of the darkest corners of those dark years.

 

Hélène has been called the French Anne Frank, but whilst both kept journals which have become key documents of the Holocaust, and both died in the last weeks before Liberation, they’re very different.   Others have noted the parallels between the publication of her journal, and the discovery of the manuscript of Irene Nemirovsky’s Suite Francaise.

 

However, these comparisons don’t do justice to the remarkable and unique qualities of this diary.  Hélène lived in the heart of Occupied Paris, walked its streets wearing the yellow star, worked with Jewish orphans, played music, fell in love.   And she wrote this poignant, vivid and impassioned account of the events she witnessed, ‘pour ne pas les oublier, parce qu’il ne faut pas oublier’, setting herself the task of recording everything, giving the unfolding tragedy its full weight, showing it raw, naked, without distortion.

 

16 April 1942

S said ‘The Germans are going to win the war’.   I said ‘No!’.  But I didn’t know what else to say.  I was conscious of my cowardice – the cowardice of not standing up in front of him for what I believed – so I shook myself – I exclaimed ‘But what will become of us if the Germans win?’.  He shrugged: ‘Bah! Nothing will change ‘.  I knew what he would say.  ‘There will always be the sun and the water’.  I was all the more irritated because deep down, at that moment, I felt the supreme pointlessness of all these arguments, in the face of beauty.  And yet I knew that I was falling under a malign spell.  … I forced myself to say: ‘but they won’t let everyone enjoy the light and the water’.  Happily, this phrase saved me.  I don’t want to be a coward.

8 June 1942

My God, I had no idea it would be so hard.  I was so brave all day.  I held my head high, and looked people straight in the face, when they averted their eyes.  But it’s hard.  …. This morning I went out with Mother.  Two kids in the street pointed at us, saying ‘Hey, have you seen? Jews’. But otherwise things seemed normal.  … A young couple were waiting, I saw the woman point me out to her companion.  I heard her say. ‘It’s heartbreaking’.  On the bus there was a woman, probably a domestic servant, who had already smiled at me before getting on board, and who turned serveral times to smile; a smart gentleman stared at me:  I couldn’t interpret the stare, but I looked back proudly.

18 July 1942

I felt guilty, that there was something I hadn’t seen, this reality.  This woman, her sister who has four children has been taken.  The evening of the round-up, she hid, but unluckily went back up to the concierge just as they came to find her.  Mme Bieder is like a hunted animal.  She’s not afraid for herself.  but she’s terrified that they’ll take her children from her.  ….  At Montmartre, there were so many arrests that the streets were blocked.  The faubourg Saint Denis is almost deserted.  They’re separating mothers from their children.  I’m recording the facts hastily, so as not to forget, because we musn’t forget.

31 January 1944

I used to quote, not long ago, a phrase from a Russian play: ‘We shall rest, Uncle Vanya, we shall rest’.  It meant the sleep of the tomb.  But more and more I say to  myself that only the dead escape this persecution; when I hear of the death of a Jew now, I think, ‘they’re out of the reach of the Germans’.  Isn’t that horrible?  We hardly weep for the dead any more.

15 February 1944

Why then does the German soldier who I pass in the street not attack or bother me?  Why does he often hold the train door for me, or say ‘Excuse me’ if he blocks my way?  Why?  Becuase people don’t know – or rather they don’t think any more, they’re just about whatever they’ve been ordered to do right now.  But they don’t even see the incomprehensible illogic of holding the door open for me, when tomorrow they may send me to be deported, and yet I will be the same unique person. … Also no doubt they don’t know everything – one atrocious characteristic of this regime is its hypocrisy. They don’t know all of the horrible details of the persecutions, because there’s only a small group of torturers, and of Gestapo who are implicated in it. Would they feel it, if they knew?  Would they feel the suffering of these people dragged from their homes, these women separated from their flesh and blood? They’re too brutalised for that.  And then they don’t think – I always come back to that – I believe it’s the source of evil and the thing on which this regime bases its power.  Annihilate personal thoughts, the reaction of the individual conscience, that’s the first step to Nazism’.

 

 

Cultured and intelligent, a student at the Sorbonne until the anti-semitic laws prevented her from continuing her studies, 21 year old Hélène begins her journal in 1942 with an account of her visit to the home of poet Paul Valéry, who’s signed a copy of a book for her.  She is ‘overwhelmed with joy’.  At this stage, the war is, in a sense, just background noise.  Even so, even this early on, she senses a chasm opening up between her life, and that of her non-Jewish friends.  Little by little she is overwhelmed as she grasps the reality of what is happening around her, and the last words of her journal are a quotation from Macbeth  ‘Horror! Horror! Horror!’

 

Hélène constantly questions herself.  Should she try to get away, or stay in Paris?  She asks herself why, knowing what her fate is likely to be, she’s done nothing to avoid it.  She understands that the danger is increasing: ‘There aren’t many Jews left in Paris, and it’s the Germans who are arresting people now [rather than the French police], so there is less chance of escaping, because we won’t be warned.’  She believes, nonetheless, that to flee would be a defection, an act of bad faith.

 

In January 1944, Hélène writes ‘Will I make it to the end?’.  After several months of moving around each day and staying with different friends, she and her parents went home, for just one night.  That’s where they were arrested, on 8 March.

 

They were taken to the Drancy transit camp, and then deported, on Convoy 70 to Auschwitz, where Antoinette Berr was gassed on 30 April, and Raymond Berr was murdered in September.  Hélène survived for more than a year.  She was moved to Bergen-Belsen in November, where she was killed, just  five days before the camp was liberated.

 

She so nearly did make it to the end.

 

 

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Hidden

Posted by cathannabel in French 20th century history on October 16, 2012

17 October.  A demonstration is scheduled in the heart of the city, against a curfew recently imposed on certain sections of the population.   There are about 30,000 demonstrators, men, women and children, many in their Sunday best, a signal of their peaceful intentions.   But the reception, as they emerge from the stations and move  towards their meeting place, is anything but peaceful.  The police are ready for them, their instructions to pay back one blow with ten, with the assurance that whatever happens, they have the backing of their superiors.   Of the 30,000, 11,000 are arrested.  Some of these are herded into buses and taken to a nearby sports stadium, where they are interrogated and beaten up.  Some are beaten and thrown into the river, or hung from trees and lampposts.   Probably – and we’ll never know for sure – 200 of the demonstrators are killed.

This happened in Paris, in 1961, to Algerians and others of North African origin, in the context of the Algerian War and terrorist activity by the FLN.   That it isn’t widely known about – was barely spoken of at all until the 1990s – is the result of one of the most successful cover-ups of our time.

It’s not that there were no accounts of these events at the time – the arrest, beating and murder of so many could hardly go unnoticed in the centre of Paris.    But in France itself, there was rigorous state censorship -  films and photographs were seized and destroyed, and journalists  found their reports buried or edited to match the official line that it was a riot that was firmly dealt with by the police.  This was echoed by most of the international press, who at best suggested that perhaps the police response was a tad firmer than absolutely necessary.   Amongst the Algerian community, fear of reprisals largely ensured that, even as people desperately tried to find out what had happened to family members who never came home after the demonstration, their experiences were not made public.

Simone de Beauvoir wrote about the massacre in her autobiography, drawing on her friend Claude Lanzmann’s first-hand account:

The cops were waiting for the Algerians at the exits to the Metro …  [Lanzmann] saw with his own eyes how they kicked them in the teeth and  smashed their skulls.  Bodies were found hanging from the trees on the Bois du Boulogne and others, disfigured and mutilated, in the Seine. …   Afterwards, I heard the … bare-faced lies: two dead, when we already know of more than 50.

Plaque commémorative du massacre des algériens...

Plaque commémorative du massacre des algériens lors de la manifestation du 17 octobre 1961 sous les ordres du Préfet de Police Maurice Papon, implantée sur la Passerelle de la Fraternité à Aubervilliers (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

That there is now a plaque on the Pont St Michel, and films and TV documentaries about that night in October 1961, is due mainly to the fact that the person in charge of the Paris police force at the time was one Maurice Papon, who in the 1980s came under scrutiny not for his treatment of Algerian demonstrators twenty years earlier, but for his complicity in the deportation of Jews from Bordeaux almost twenty years before that.    During the course of his somewhat belated trial, the connection with the massacre was brought to light.

Didier Daeninckx’s noir policier Meurtres pour la Mémoire linked the massacre with the deportations (without naming Papon) in 1984, but interestingly was not the first fictional treatment of the massacre.   Black American writer William Gardner Smith wrote The Stone Face in 1963, and Kristin Ross, in her study of the afterlife of May 68, writes that:

It is a mark of the success surrounding the official blackout of information about October 17 that Smith’s novel, written by a foreigner in France and published in the United States (it could not be published in France), would stand as one of the few representations of the event available all the way up until the early 1990s – until the moment, that is, when a generation of young Beurs, as the children of North African immigrants call themselves, had reached an age at which they could begin to demand information about their parents’ fate. Professional or academic historians have lagged well behind amateurs in the attempt to discover what occurred on October 17; investigative journalists, militants, and fiction writers like Smith, or the much more widely read detective novelist, Didier Daeninckx, kept a trace of the event alive during the thirty years when it had entered a “black hole” of memory.

For many, Michael Hanecke’s film Caché (Hidden) was the first introduction to the 17 October massacre.  There’s only a brief mention of it but nonetheless it sits at the heart of the film, a film about memory and the burying of memory.  It led me to try to find out whether – as seemed improbable at first – such a thing could have happened and left so little trace.

Cover of "Cache (Hidden)"

Cover of Cache (Hidden)

There are so many aspects of this story that fascinate.  The connection between collaboration in the deportation of Jews during the Occupation and the violent repression of dissent by French citizens of north African origin even extends to the fact that an earlier crack-down on Algerian demonstrators by Papon had involved the use of the Vel’d’Hiv as a detention centre.   And the fact that an event witnessed by so many could be so effectively hidden from view reflects the way in which the history of collaboration during the Occupation had to be dragged painfully into the light over decades.

There’s also the contrast with the public response to the brutal suppression of a demonstration in February 1962 organised by the Communist Party – the eight who were killed became the symbols of state violence during the Algerian War.   One might have thought that this would have brought the October massacre back into public consciousness, but it seems to have had the opposite effect – it was simply eclipsed.  Le Monde even reported the suppression of the Charonne demonstration as the most violent state action since 1934.   Why?  The only plausible explanation is the fact that the October demonstrators, unlike those who were killed and beaten a few months later, were overwhelmingly Algerian or North African.

Of course, the notion of an official cover-up is terribly pertinent today as we await prosecutions, 23 years after the event, in relation to Hillsborough.  In both cases, what happened was both known and not known.  Known because these things happened in public places, because there were eye-witnesses, photographs, films, newspaper articles.  Not known because, in the case of the 17 October massacre those accounts were suppressed by the machinery of the state, and in the case of Hillsborough because no matter how often the truth was published and asserted it barely seemed to dent the falsehoods that had been disseminated at the time so vigorously by the police and others.

It took forty years for the victims of the 17 October massacre to be commemorated officially.  We don’t know how many of them there were.  We don’t know all of their names, or exactly what happened to most of them.   But the events of that night in 1961 are no longer hidden.

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